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The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) QUOTES

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) QUOTES

1 " You cannot change what you are, only what you do. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

2 " That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

3 " Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don't give way. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

4 " You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

5 " All good things pass away. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

6 " One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

7 " when you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

8 " If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

9 " We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

10 " You speak of destiny as if it was fixed. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

11 " We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

12 " There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

13 " Darling, no one would ever dream of performing an operation on a child without testing it first. And no one in a thousand years would take a child's daemon away altogether! All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful. Forever! You see, your daemon's a wonderful friend and com panion when you're young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you're coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that's what lets Dust in. A quick little operation before that, and you're never troubled again. And your daemon stays with you, only...just not connected. Like a... like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in the world!
Wouldn't you like that? (Marisa Coulter) "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

14 " But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like?

Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.

But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

15 " We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—'

She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good... "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

16 " Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming? "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

17 " It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

18 " When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

19 " She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)

20 " The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky. "

― Philip Pullman , The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)